I do a lot of “teaching” in my everyday work as a grant consultant. Every time the phone rings with an inquiry into my services, I generally end up assessing, and then “teaching,” about grant readiness, grant timelines, the importance of individual donors, partnerships and collaboration, or the importance of assessing their prospect potential before entering into grants. Here’s what I mean.
- Grant Readiness: It’s not just about having your 501c3 or knowing where your 990 is! It’s about organizational and fiscal structure and strength, board strength, and your agency’s ability to manage a grant.
- Grant Timelines: When beginning a new grant program within your agency, you should expect it to take at least 18 months to reap ANY benefits.
- Individual Donors: Not only do individual donations account for 70% of all philanthropy (grants are about 17%), but a strong individual donor base makes you more attractive to
grant funders. - Partnerships and collaborations: They actually convey strength, flexibility, cooperativity, communicativeness, and an ability to think outside yourself – all strengths in a grant funder’s eyes!
- Prospect potential: I always advise agencies starting out in grants to conduct prospect research FIRST to determine if there’s enough potential to invest in the initiative.
I advise my clients too. On all matters grant-related, but also donor relations, project design, project management, and sustainability. Here’s what I mean.
- Donor relations: Funder relations is the same as donor relations. Grant funders don’t like being treated as an ATM, and we shouldn’t treat them that way. So pick up the phone! Talk to them! Involve them!
- Project design: I ask the question early: how are we measuring this? I take it back to the program’s design; designing measurements into the program can help reporting happen organically.
- Project management: If you don’t account for oversight of all the moving parts of a new program in the budget (and in the design), integrated with all the other things you have going on in your agency, you’ll run the risk of that new program actually losing you money.
- Sustainability: Asking a funder to support one key purchase to make a program sustainable is one thing; asking for a thing that just has to be replaced year after year ad infinitum is NOT sustainable, it’s stop-gap funding.
The list goes on. But as you can see, grant writing in the consulting world involves a lot of teaching, coaching, and training.
Which is why I have taken the step to focus on it solely in my business practice. I spent a year researching the different ways to bring this to fruition, and landed on an online course that is approachable and accessible, and makes the whole grants process achievable.
My new course is called Unlock-Grants, and it does just that for the Early Career grant professional – it Unlocks Grants. I also use the platform to speak to the non-Grant Ready, and offer them a realistic path to fundraise, and become Grant Ready.
My goal, my mission, is to dispel the myths and misconceptions around grants, and reach the person new to grants and empower them to write their grant proposals themselves, and be ready to work with a staffer or consultant when they’re ready. I give the non-Grant Ready alternatives to their goal of raising money for their new nonprofit. I take not one, but several paths to take you there – for all the adult learners and the different ways they capture and hold knowledge.
Be on the lookout for the launch of Unlock-Grants on November 1. I can’t wait to bring it to you! Here’s a preview of what’s to come, and an offer to help you jumpstart your grant writing career!
